


Which the Frost had Made Between

by Orockthro



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: First Meetings, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Hypothermia, M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 16:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3418355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Napoleon peels his eyes open and cranes his neck up off the floor. Laying atop him, curled up like a cat, is a blond man. Both their arms are folded up and tucked together between their chests, presumably for warmth, and the offending poke at his collarbone is none other than the man’s chin nestling at the crook of his neck.</p>
<p>“Oh. You’re not dead,” the warm weight says. “That’s good.” The words, muffled but surprisingly forceful, rattle against his shoulder.</p>
<p> <i>(Or, Illya and Napoleon meet as two very young men in a very cold prison.)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Which the Frost had Made Between

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a little ditty to spare my brain from some more plotty fic I have in the hopper... and then grew. Apparently I can't write drabbles.

He wakes up warmer. Not warm, exactly, because he’s possibly forgotten what that feels like, but not-cold, which is almost as good. There’s a crushing weight on his chest, and for a moment he thinks he’s warm because he’s dying, that maybe his heart’s given out on him and this is the end: on his back in a THRUSH cell. It isn’t on Napoleon’s top ten list of ways to die, and he has time to think that maybe it’s a little sad he has one.

Then the warm weight moves a little, and something pokes into the soft flesh under his collarbone. Then it shifts, stills, and starts to snore.

Napoleon peels his eyes open and cranes his neck up off the floor. Laying atop him, curled up like a cat, is a blond man. Both their arms are folded up and tucked together between their chests, presumably for warmth, and the offending poke at his collarbone is none other than the man’s chin nestling at the crook of his neck.

“Hey!” He pulls his arms out from the cocoon of warmth between them and jostles a shoulder, but the man just burrows deeper against him. “Hey, wake up.”

“Oh. You’re not dead,” the warm weight says. “That’s good.” The words, muffled but surprisingly forceful, rattle against his shoulder.

He freezes. Or doesn’t freeze, more aptly, as the man radiates heat into him like honey. “Ah... was that in question?” He doesn’t remember falling asleep in here, only being cold and wishing he were back at Survival School instead, a thing he swore never to wish. Cold temperatures and sleep don’t mix well, and he’s not foolish enough to minimize the dangers.

There’s a grunt and a rough poke to his kidney, and the man peers up, too, and Napoleon is met with startling blue eyes. “Yes.”

“Well in that case, thank you.” It sounds stiff even to his own ears. Thank you for stopping me from freezing to death in an unheated prison isn’t the sort of thing he has a lot of practice saying.

Napoleon tests his back, his neck, his shoulders, and finds everything in working order. Cold, but in working order. He sucks in breath and surges upright, spilling the man off his chest and onto the concrete. “Now if you wouldn’t mind telling me who you are?” It doesn’t come out quite as impressive as he’d like, as the loss of the man means the loss of that warmth, and his teeth start chattering mid sentence. He not only doesn’t remember falling asleep, he still doesn’t quite remember how he got here, either. It makes him testy.

“I’m cold, that’s what I am,” the man says peevishly. He’s all knobby knees and elbows, dressed in the same recycled blue prison uniform as Napoleon, his own clothes and belongings clearly stripped from him as completely Napoleon’s own. Now that he’s sitting up, the accent catches him. It’s delicate, hard to pin down, but something certainly not from the Americas.

“Cute. Now really, though, who are you and how did you come to be a prisoner of our dear captors?”

The man eyes him, face suddenly closed and suspicious. He scuttles towards the wall and does his best impression of a relaxed man sprawled there. It’s about as convincing as Napoleon’s bravado. “You, too? I should have guessed.”

“Ah?”

“I will tell you nothing. I should have let you freeze.”

“Now hang on just a minute! I don’t know what you’re thinking...”

But that’s it for his cellmate. His attempts at conversation are met with silence, and nothing he can do gets the man’s gaze. He rolls onto his side facing the wall, curls in on himself like a blond caterpillar, and goes still.

Napoleon watches him. There’s little else to watch. The room is like their garb; utilitarian and well used. There are a few interesting scratches in the wall, but nothing else, not even a too-high-to-reach window to occupy his hope and imagination. Just a shivering, pale man hunched in the corner. Not that Napoleon has any delusions he looks much better. He mimics his roommate’s stance, tucks his hands under his armpits to keep them warm, and curls his legs as close to his middle as he can bring them. Nothing takes the cold bite out of the entire length of him that’s pressed to the wall, though. At least before, when he woke up, his core was warmed.

“Look, I don’t know what I did to upset you, but we’re going to freeze to death in here unless we at least get near one another.”

The man doesn’t move. His back is still rising and falling, too fast for him to be asleep, and Napoleon tries to content himself with at least the fact that he isn’t conversing with a corpse.

It’s possibly lack of food, lack of water, lack of everything, addling his brain, but he can’t stop remembering the soft hair tucked under his chin, and the heat radiating up off of his scalp into Napoleon’s throat. “I won’t ask you any questions, I give you my word. Just let me lay down near you?”

Silence. But then the body unfurls, just a little, and Napoleon breathes a sigh that puffs white in the air. He slides across the floor, shaking with cold and maybe also shock, until his side comes flush against the man’s. The warmth there is nearly enough to send him to tears, but he doesn’t risk it. They might freeze to his skin. He sleeps, smelling dirty, warm hair and soured, warm skin.

 

*

 

When Napoleon wakes he is alone again. He has yet to be questioned, though he’s unsure if his captors are simply playing the waiting game or if they truly are uninterested. He’s a fairly fresh UNCLE agent, it’s true, but he’s still a Section II man, and it prickles his pride that he’s not considered valuable enough prey to even be interrogated. Likely he’ll just be a bargaining chip in some prisoner swap. With any luck, it’ll be a swap that happens to include all his toes and fingers (and nothing else important) lost to frostbite either.

The thing about interminable confinement without interrogation that Survival School was unable to teach, is the absolute boredom of it. Now, counting the scratches in the wall for the seventh time in the row and trying to decide if they truly *were* finger length apart or if they only appeared that way, Napoleon can attribute plenty of first hand experience to the situation. He was never a POW in the army. He didn’t, frankly, think he would start on US soil. At least he thinks it’s US soil. It was US soil the last time he had a good look around.

He counts the scratches an eighth time. Then a ninth. He does jumping jacks and then starts over again, careful to toe the line between keeping warm and conserving his energy for a possible escape.

The cell door, designed just like the false ones in Cutter’s wretched faux interrogation center out on Survival Island, apparently modeled after the real McCoy, swings open on steel hinges. Napoleon presses himself into the corner and readies for an attack.

But there’s not one. There’s a THRUSH goon dragging a limp prisoner across the threshold, kicking his body clear of the door, and shutting it behind him.

“Damn!” Napoleon doesn’t wait for the door to slam shut before he’s off his heels and rolling his cellmate onto his back. He recoils immediately. He’s soaked from the waist up in ice water. “Damn!” He’s repeating himself. That’s not good, either.

He assumes the man’s unconscious as he drags him farther away from the door and starts to fumble with his shirt. But when Napoleon’s own frozen fingers begin to undo the buttons to strip him of the sopping, heat-leaching material, his eyes flash open and his hands reach for Solo’s throat.

“Hey! Stop that!” He’s vicious for a man half frozen and half drowned, but his grip is weak and he doesn’t choke Napoleon so much as hold on and stare up at him. It takes less energy to just ignore him and work on the buttons than to try and fight him off.

“Don’t...” the man says, trailing off as his energy drops suddenly. Whatever adrenaline rush had been fueling him is rapidly depleting.

“You saved me. I’m just returning the favor, that’s all.” The pants he leaves on. They’re somehow dry, which lends the unpleasant image a THRUSH agent holding a blond head down in a bucket of water while he thrashes. The drenched shirt he tosses into the farthest corner with a splat, and strips his own off to use as a towel to dry him as much as possible, rubbing it up and down his chest and arms as fast as he can, and through his hair, doing his best to wick away the worst of the moisture. Napoleon is shivering like an epileptic, but, the loose hands still dangling around his throat and chest to ward him off ignored, the man is completely still without a shiver in sight.

“Damn.” That’s the third time he’s sworn. Unimaginative of him. “You’re hypothermic.”

The fingers around his throat are like icicles. He plucks a hand loose and slips two fingers in his mouth, holds them there until they warm or his tongue goes numb, he’s not sure which, and then alternates. It would be sensual, except for the fact that there’s a real chance the man will die by morning. He pulls him up into an awkward embrace, presses their chests together, rubbing any exposed skin with his palms until they’re both red.

“Don’t...” the man says again, and Napoleon isn’t sure to what he’s objecting. Being manhandled like this certainly isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, but it’s frankly the only thing likely to keep both of them alive.

“I didn’t realize your fashion sense would object quite so much to the loss of that fine shirt,” he jokes. It’s not his best.

Finally he gets an eye-roll, just in time for earthquake-like shakes to start rolling off his unexpected roommate.

“Keep shivering, chum.”

Bare chested in an icebox holding a stranger and sucking on his fingers. Life has an odd way of turning. The blond hair is still damp, and he nearly jumps out of his skin when the head droops and lays down across his shoulder. “Jesus that’s cold!” He has to pull out one set of fingers to do it, and replaces it with the next once he’s finished speaking.

They aren’t going to make it. He comes to the fatalistic conclusion with a rush of adrenaline that would be nauseating if he’d eaten in the last day. He doesn’t want to die here. He doesn’t want this man to die here, either. He turns his head towards the door and shouts, “Hey, at least give us blankets! You’re not going to have any prisoners come tomorrow!”

The man huffs. “What makes you think they care if we die?” Clattering teeth interrupt the sentence, giving it a halting cadence that’s blisteringly harsh.

“They’re asking questions, that usually means we’re worth something. What were they asking you anyhow?”

The laugh that comes out of him between chattering teeth is ugly and sour. “And I suppose now is when I’m supposed to tell you all the things I wouldn’t tell your friends.”

“Are you still on about that?”

“Your heat is valuable to me, otherwise I would kill you. Don’t think otherwise.”

Napoleon shuts his mouth with a clack. “You really think I’m one of them?” It’s more startling than the laughable idea that his cellmate could kill him in his state. He couldn’t tie a shoelace let alone murder anyone.

One blue eye cracks open to look at him impassionately. “No one is as naive as you.”

“Hey now!”

“I rest my case.”

“Well, rest, anyhow. You can have your delusions later, provided we both live through the night.”

The man huffs, and it’s a rush of hot air against his exposed skin. “If you aren’t one of them, why are you doing this?” He asks it quietly, and even between the clattering teeth, Napoleon would be a fool not to hear the vulnerability interlaced with skepticism.

“Haven’t you ever heard of goodwill between men? Besides, we’re in the same situation here. And maybe your heat is valuable to me, too.” The last part he says as a joke, but it’s a sick one, and he regrets it almost instantly.

“Hm.”

He falls asleep then, or pretends to, Napoleon isn’t sure. And so Napoleon holds him as close to his body as he can, presses the two of them into the corner where he can keep an eye on the door, and counts the scratches on the wall for the tenth time. This time, when he’s close to nodding off himself, he’s certain they truly are a finger width apart from one another. He’s not sure he wants to know how desperate a man has to be before he ruins his hands scratching at a wall.

 

*

 

He wakes cold, and for a long second while he pries his eyes open, he’s terrified that means he’s holding a corpse, that the man died in the night and the stiff frozen thing he’s laying next to is his body. He didn’t even know his name. But he does get his eyes open, and he’s half relieved to find he is alone again, and the cold he’s huddled next to is the wall.

This time they do come for him.

“Mr. Solo,” a man in a suit says. He’s taken to a room with chair set in the middle of it, like something out of a bad movie. The man motions for him to have a seat, and he does so for lack of any other options. Hot air is piped through a vent in the ceiling and he can feel his arms prickle with the sensation of it. It burns, it’s so warm. He wants to cry, but he’s 26 now, been in the army and out of it, been through Survival School and made it into UNCLE. He hasn’t cried in years.

“Ah, you know who I am, then. Great. Am I free to go?”

“You have a sense of humor. That’s good. I find it makes my prisoners last longer.”

Napoleon swallows.

“I’m going to be honest, Mr. Solo. You’re a nobody. You aren’t worth the price of that chair to me. Maybe someday if you live you’ll be a valuable agent, but right now you’re a waste of air.”

“Then what am I doing here?”

The man in the suit smiles a shark’s smile, all teeth. There are three THRUSH goons behind him, and he recognises the one who dragged his cellmate, sopping wet and drowned, through the door. But there’s no bucket of water here, nor any other torture devices that he can see. And then Napoleon gets it. He’s cold again, despite the heat vent. “You’re using me. I might as well be one of you, like he said I was.”

“Tell me his name, Solo. We know he’s with UNCLE.”

“I don’t think I can. It’s this dry air, you see, it’s not good for my vocal chords.”

The blow comes out of nowhere, hits him high on the left cheekbone and leaves his head spinning. He spits and it lands pink on the concrete next to his feet.

“You are worthless to me, which means I might let you live if you answer my questions.”

His head is spinning, only half from the blow. If his cellmate is an UNCLE agent, he’s not one from the New York office. But there are a lot of offices, and Napoleon is fresh enough not to recognise all the faces who belong to them. “Do I get to ask questions in return? A one-sided conversation is just so dreary, you know?” He’s ready to continue his diatribe, but a boot to the gut cuts him off, and he gags.

“I’m throwing you a lifeline, boy. Take it.”

Napoleon shakes a little, and braces his forearms on the arms of the chair. He’s going to die here, and he doesn’t even really know where here is, let alone what went wrong on the mission he was on. He’d been posted on watch duty with Anders and Georg. He’d gotten a bit tired, so he left the van to have a walk around the block to wake himself up. And then he’d woken up here. As far as kidnapping stories went, it was pretty weak. As was shark-smile’s opinion of his honor.

“Sorry, pal, I don’t take well to being a rat.”

He only sees the boot, he doesn't feel it connect with his head, which he thinks later is a small mercy.

 

*

 

He wakes to find himself dressed in a cotton shirt, and with his cellmate’s arms around him, both of which are pleasant enough sensations.

“Hi.”

The arms start. “You’re not dead. Good.”

He laughs, and then stops when his ribs protest. “Does it feel like we’ve already had this conversation?”

“Hm.”

He peels himself away, even though it means losing heat. “Where’d the clothes come from?” The shirt feels thicker than the last one, but the cold still bites.

“A gift from our warden. It would seem you are in his favor.”

Napoleon looks up and catches the man’s eyes watching him carefully. “And yet you didn’t kill me. My heat still that valuable?”

“You’re alive. Is that answer enough?”

The banter is relaxing and tempting, and he finds himself enjoying the unfamiliar cadences of his words, but it’s a false comfort. He wraps his arms around himself and forces his eyes to meet those blue ones. “You’re not wrong, though. He wants me to befriend you and gain your trust. He offered me a way out of this hellhole if I betray you. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you did kill me, although don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope you don’t.”

The man snorts, an abortive little sound that doesn’t hold the weight it should.

Napoleon feels his eyes widen. “You... don’t believe me?”

“I think you are concussed.”

“Ah.” The world tilts. “That’s very possible.”

 And then he vomits in the corner.

 

*

 

The food their THRUSH captor serves them is gruel. Napoleon picks at his reluctantly, until hunger finally drives him to take a bite. By the time he’s swallowed a spoonful, his cellmate has nearly finished his whole bowl. The only good thing about it is its temperature. It’s warm, and steam rises off the gray clumps in waves.

“I’ll eat yours if you don’t want it.”

“Hold your horses, I’m getting there.”

“Get there faster, or I’m stealing it.”

“Kind of you to warn me...” But it does spur him on to suffer through a second bite, and then a third, and then momentum takes its course, along with his starving body, and he’s scraping the sides for extra before he knows it.

“Dare I ask what dinner looks like?”

Blue eyes squint at him. “That *was* dinner.”

Already the pit of his stomach is yearning for more. “Oh.”

This time when they come for him, he’s not just cold and hungry, he’s angry. There are three goons that he counts, in addition to their host himself, the suit shark, plus an additional two he hasn’t seen before, guarding the room with the single chair. Six to two, they’re not great odds, but they’re not awful odds either, even half starved and frozen as they are. Not when the alternative is to slowly waste away. It’s apparent no help is coming.

The problem is the place itself, in addition to the guards. It’s a rats nest of shadowed corridors, and Napoleon hasn’t a doubt in the world it’s booby trapped for all its worth. He’s only been paraded between the room with the chair and his cell, and he’s not at all sure how deep underground they are, only that heat and air have to be piped in, or not piped in, as is the case of their humble abode.

“We need a plan,” he says through the side of his mouth when his cellmate comes back, a reddening mark on the side of his face already turning livid, and a split lip where his tooth probably did equal damage to himself and a goon’s fist. He’s not sure he looks any better. They hit him a few times about the face, and strung him up to hang by his wrists for what felt like a solid hour. His fingers still tingle.

His cellmate harumphs again; it’s a sound he’s getting accustomed to. “I have one.”

Napoleon grins, and then grimaces as his own split lip opens up again and the unpleasant taste of gruel is replaced with copper. “Care to share with the class?”

“Hm, I think not.”

He licks his lip and then regretes it a stinging second later. “I haven’t asked you a single damned thing. I haven’t asked you your name, or what branch of UNCLE you work for, or even what section. The least you can do is extend the same--”

“Trust?”

He goes still. His cellmate smiles, unkindly, and there’s blood on his teeth, hopefully just from the lip and not something more insidious.

“We are two men alone in a cell together, that is all. It is just how things must be.”

“You’re wrong. There’s no reason it has to be like that at all. There’s no reason we can’t approach this as partners.”

“Partners.”

“I think we work well together, don’t you?”

“I think... I think tomorrow will be long and we should sleep.”

Napoleon spits to clear his throat of blood, and nods. There is logic in that, and he’s learned you can’t force a mule to do much of anything, but that doesn’t mean you give up. You just learn to change your approach. He closes the distance between them and squeezes himself in the space between the man and the corner. He gets a glare for his efforts, but no move to shove him away.

“We’re both agents. Don’t forget that,” Napoleon says, and then resigns himself to silence.

He’s tired, more tired than he realized. This place is killing them both in slow measures. Either it will be the cold, or malnutrition, or a beating, but he has no doubt that if they don’t escape, they will both wind up corpses in this box. He leans back and doesn’t feel the slightest shame to find himself pillowed in the man’s arms, staring up at him from his lap. It’s half survival, and half comfort for both of them, he’s sure, despite the aloof nature they each try to project.

There was neither time nor reason to look at him before, beyond the basics. In the unending flourescent light of their cold cell, curled in the lap of this stranger, he’s shocked to realize he might be older than this man. The only lines on his face are pain and exhaustion, and only the barest shadow of stubble shows across his chin.

“I don’t even know your name.” The words are out of his mouth before he can catch them. “Ah, ignore me. Don’t answer that.”

The body under him shifts even though his face doesn’t so much as twitch. The man is staring off at the far wall.

He hasn’t fallen asleep being held, at least not consciously, since his wife died. It’s different, of course. They are strangers staving off death by elements, and holding onto civility by their fingernails. This man is nothing like her. But Napoleon can’t quite shake the ghostly similarity of two arms tucked around his shoulders, and warm breath against his bare neck.

It’s a long time before his cellmate speaks again, and Napoleon is hovering on the edge of sleep: too cold to fully sink into slumber and too exhausted to do much else.

“Is this your first mission?”

Napoleon licks his lips and then wishes he hadn’t. Blood flakes off and his lip starts bleeding anew. “Third.”

“Hm, you are not very lucky.”

Napoleon snorts around a mouthful of blood. He wants to spit it out, but that would mean sitting up from his current position, and that would mean a blast of cold air. He swallows the blood and tries not to taste it. It sours in his stomach, and he tries not to taste that, either.

“On the contrary, my friend. I’m not dead, and neither are you. I think that makes me very lucky.”

He looks up at blue eyes. For the first time, the man’s face breaks into something that’s not disdain or forced impassivity. The corners of his mouth curl up  into what passes for a half-way-decent smile.

“Look,” Napoleon says quietly at that smile. “They don’t care about me. So do me a favor: if you get out of here and I don’t, report to my boss, will you? Alexander Waverly out of New York.”

“And tell him he should train his agents better?”

His hackles rise before he realizes he’s being teased. He grins back. “Hot stuff coming from a fellow captive.”

“Yes, but I took out a building on my way down, can you say the same?”

“Not hardly, but I bet I can take one down on my way out.”

The smile widens. “I look forward to seeing that.”

“Napoleon.”

“What?”

“My name. I can’t know yours, but you can know mine. It’s Solo. Napoleon Solo.”

The silence is amicable, and he slowly realizes he’s being lulled into sleep. He’s still not warm, but he’s comfortable.

“Very well... Napoleon,” is the last thing he hears before he slips under into a restless slumber.

 

*

 

There is no concept of time in a windowless box. His watch is long gone, and the only semblance of rhythm is the steaming gruel delivered at regular intervals. How long these intervals are, Napoleon isn’t sure. He is sure, though, that he’s ravenous when the bowls come, and still ravenous when they’re collected.

It’s over a bowl of gruel that his companion says, quietly, “When they come to collect our tray, jump the one on the left.”

It’s still not a particularly forthright discussion of possible escape plans, but Napoleon grins. It’s a start.

“With pleasure. Partner.”

 


End file.
